Kevin Trenberth’s latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction: Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many…

Barry Bickmore’s 40-minute explanation of why he stopped denying climate science is worth the time. As a a geochemistry professor, it should come as no surprise that he eventually came around, only that it took as long. But better late than never. He teaches at Brigham Young University in Utah, is an active Mormon, and…

David Roberts is, as usual, bang on in his latest Grist column, lamenting the pointlessness of the debate between those who insist we need more research and development before tackling climate change, and those who say we shouldn’t wait. (Roberts is among the best commenters around when it comes to the social and political context…

Australia’s Senate has approved a controversial law on pollution, after years of bitter political wrangling. The Clean Energy Act will force the country’s 500 worst-polluting companies to pay a tax on their carbon emissions from 1 July next year. –– BBC

Among the very best of the science-oriented blogs I try to read regularly is Tom Levenson’s Inverse Square Blog. Tom, who teaches science journalism at MIT, isn’t a climatologist, but whenever he writes about climate science or politics, it’s usually worth a look. Apparently, the folks at Scientific American agree, and they recently invited Tom…

Don’t get me wrong. I love NPR. I listen to it for at least four hours a day. But lately I’ve found the network’s embrace of “he said, she said” journalism a little too difficult to swallow. This morning’s report on censorship of a scientific report commissioned by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality isn’t…

Everyone talks about global warming, but it’s not easy to get one’s mind around just how much heat we’re talking about. Even more difficult is putting that heat energy in terms that the average layperson can grasp. Fortunately, some scientists are making an effort to do just that. In a recent paper in Geophysical Research…